Today I had a problem with my iPhone again. When I leave the office, I have to go down to an underground parking garage to get my car. Obviously I lose what little signal I actually get at work. One might think that as soon as you get out of the garage, you’d be fine. You would get your beloved signal back and all would be good, right?

No, not right. There are many things in this world I don’t understand, I am just a man. One such thing is the mysteries that must explain the laws of iPhone cellular connectivity. I would think that it’s constantly searching for signal, if it’s present it gets the best it can, if not, it doesn’t. I would of course be wrong, because when I get out of the building, I still have no signal. I might still have signal until I do one of several things (only one of which works) which I’ll describe in a minute.

Today I left the office and decided to wait, wait until I got signal back. I traveled this route:

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That’s right, 2.1 miles and 5 minutes later (not including traffic and lights) I still had zero signal. Now I travel this route and talk on the phone, via headset of course, nearly every week day. I know there is signal here. It seems like the iPhone just sucks at re-acquiring a signal.

And What’s More

Why doesn’t switching the phone into airplane mode reset the radio and prepare it to acquire a fresh signal? I am guessing since the intent is while you are ON an airplane, it expects a different network  and would scan for the best possible network to connect to when you turn it back off.

The problem is that it doesn’t. When you turn airplane mode back off, it’s got the same crappy non-working, call failing signal I had when I got out of the parking garage. We are talking 3G indicator with 4 minimum bars. For some reason I can get email, and text messages, but I can’t make phone calls.

And What’s More

The only way I have found to fix it is to physically reboot the phone. So why the hell does it take so long? Why does my phone take longer to shut down than a 3 year old install of Windows XP? It doesn’t make sense. If it’s really based on Darwin, when it sends a kill, shouldn’t it just KILL? Why do I have to wait literally over a minute for my phone to turn off, and nearly a minute for it to boot again. Two minutes doesn’t seem long, until you are standing there trying to make a damned phone call.

It seems like the one thing my iPhone does very poorly is actually making and receiving phone calls. We have all complained about the call quality and of course the ever present dropped calls, but there seem to be a whole rats nest of problems with the iPhone when it comes to telephony. Sorry to rant, but this one is getting old, it happens nearly every day when I leave work.

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